Working with Roswell the Webby Award-Winning, Shopify Platinum Partner
The relationship
Roswell is a full-service Shopify Platinum Partner based in the US, Webby award-winning, and built around maximising customer lifetime value for the e-commerce brands it works with. Their offer spans Shopify Plus development, retention marketing, paid media, SEO, branding, photography, conversion rate optimisation, subscription commerce, systems integration, e-commerce migrations, composable commerce, and data analytics. It's a wide remit, and for most of the agency's history the reputation behind it was technical rather than creative.
Carl Cahill joined Roswell as their fractional Creative Director over five years ago. The brief, in effect, was to build a creative reputation that matched the technical one: leading the US-based creative team, pitching new business, writing proposals, managing the design team, and working directly with Roswell's client brands on e-commerce design and Shopify storefronts. Salo grew out of that relationship, and as the partnership matured, Salo's role widened with it — from a conceptual, creative-direction seat into a fully integrated part of how Roswell sells and delivers.
The relationship now runs white-labelled, with Salo woven into new business as well as delivery. Carl sits in on new business calls and works directly with Roswell's clients, and Roswell leans on Salo for the sales support that a supplier relationship wouldn't normally carry. It works across the Atlantic, US to UK, without the friction that usually implies — by Carl's account, Roswell treat Salo as part of their own team rather than an outside vendor.
Clients we have worked on together
The work
This is a role, not a fixed brief. It flexes between three things:
Creative direction and new business. Carl leads on creative concepting, pitches, and proposals, and joins client and new business calls directly alongside Roswell's team.
Design leadership and team development. Salo works alongside and helps develop Roswell's internal design team, rather than sitting apart from it.
Overflow and specialist projects. Where Roswell's internal team needs support, or a project calls for a specialist skillset, Salo picks it up across branding and e-commerce-led work for Roswell's client roster.
The single largest project has been Roswell's own rebrand: bringing the creative credibility of the Shopify Platinum Partner up to the level of its technical reputation, across brand and website. It's the clearest visible marker of what the wider relationship has been building toward.
Related projects
-
E-commerceA store engineered like ultralight hiking gear
View ProjectHikers who count every gram now see the weight of each bag and their whole order, turning a Shopify catalogue into a tool that helps them pick the right kit.
-
UI / UXA bold new identity for a Shopify Platinum Partner
View ProjectRoswell’s site now matches their confidence and builds new pages far faster, after we rebuilt it around a bolder identity.
The impact
Roswell started this relationship known mainly for its technical strength. Five years on, it's known for its creative work too, an extensive portfolio, real credibility in the Shopify ecosystem, and no lingering question marks over design quality. That shift in reputation is the throughline of the whole partnership.
For Salo, the relationship has become a model for what an embedded, white-labelled partnership can look like: close enough that the client stops experiencing Salo as a supplier, trusted enough to be pulled into sales conversations as well as delivery, and long-running enough to have built deep, specific knowledge of the e-commerce and Shopify landscape. It has also been the route into the US market that this kind of case study is meant to open up further.